Web Services Need Standards

Even today, with vendors touting web services as loudly as street corner newspaper hawkers, their success will depend largely on the ability of those competitors and software developers to develop more standards on which they can agree, experts say.

Even today, with vendors touting web services as loudly as street corner newspaper hawkers, their success will depend largely on the ability of those competitors and software developers to develop more standards on which they can agree, experts say. Its standards, after all, that allow Web services to overcome the barriers of different programming languages, operating systems and vendor platforms so multiple applications can interact.
Vendors have begun in recent months to concentrate on proposing new Web services standards in the areas of security, availability, workflow and user interfaces. These would join the four standards further along in developmentXML (Extensible Markup Language); Simple Object Access Protocol; Web Services Description Language; and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration. Even those, though, are in their earliest versions or still waiting for a stamp of approval from standards bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium.

Security is among the most pressing areas for setting standards. The main issue is defining a common way by which to authenticate users of Web services, said Bob Sutor, the director of e-business standards strategy at IBM, in Somers, N.Y. Standards around encryption are also possible, Sutor said.

Sutor said work is under way among members of the W3C and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, also known as OASIS, on creating security standards. Those security standards will be among a group of standards weaving its way through standards bodies over the next year to 18 months, Sutor said.
IBM, for instance, last month proposed HTTP Reliable, or HTTPR, as a standard for using HTTP in a more reliable way. One problem in using HTTP today in Web services is that the protocol sends messages once, sequentially, so if a connection is lost it could be difficult for those trying to exchange a Web service to know its status.
In May, IBM also put forth Web Services Flow Language as a specification for defining workflow, or business processes, within a Web service, Sutor said. Microsoft Corp. has also included a specification for workflowcalled XLangin its BizTalk Server 2000 as part of its .Net platform.
Another group of vendors, led by portal software developer Epicentric Inc., in June proposed Web Services User Interface as a standard for displaying Web services to users.
As much as vendors will be forced to come together to agree to standards, enterprise users also will need to work within their industries on fine-tuning XML specifications and agreements to make Web services useful, said Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., in Cambridge, Mass. One example of an industry effort is RosettaNet, a consortium of IT, semiconductor and electronics companies working to create and implement industrywide, open e-business process standards.
"The real issue is the industry finding and agreeing to e-business agreements," Gillett said.
Only when business partners have more technological standards for Web services and industry-specific agreements in place for using them will Web services really solve complex business problems, Gillett said.

As an online reporter for eWEEK.com, Matt Hicks covers the fast-changing developments in Internet technologies. His coverage includes the growing field of Web conferencing software and services. With eight years as a business and technology journalist, Matt has gained insight into the market strategies of IT vendors as well as the needs of enterprise IT managers. He joined Ziff Davis in 1999 as a staff writer for the former Strategies section of eWEEK, where he wrote in-depth features about corporate strategies for e-business and enterprise software. In 2002, he moved to the News department at the magazine as a senior writer specializing in coverage of database software and enterprise networking. Later that year Matt started a yearlong fellowship in Washington, DC, after being awarded an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship for Journalist. As a fellow, he spent nine months working on policy issues, including technology policy, in for a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He rejoined Ziff Davis in August 2003 as a reporter dedicated to online coverage for eWEEK.com. Along with Web conferencing, he follows search engines, Web browsers, speech technology and the Internet domain-naming system.